I'm so happy to say we won a Makeship Playback Award for the sales from the Wally Darling Makeship Plush toy back in 2023!! So I had Wally Darling make a beautiful acceptance speech on behalf of myself and the neighborhood!
Really though, thank you all for your help to continue funding this small project and thank you to Makeship for giving us the opportunity to make Merchandise for it! It's been an incredible joy to do! Thank you to @downydig for helping with puppeteering for this commercial! (Cooper is Wally's favorite and his favorite cameraman...) Thank you to @friendlyfrankenstein and @syntheticcharmva for Pouring their Wally and Howdy voice sauce into this stew! Thank yous to everyone!!!
An autistic child in their natural state will most likely be bullied on a regular basis.
They often have to actively suppress anything that makes them stand out.
Some are able to succeed at this, and people stop bullying them.
But they're then invisible. They still have no friends. They still miss out on any experiences that require friends.
When they ask how to make friends, everyone assumes that they're not even trying. Everyone assumes that they're doing nothing even though they're burning themself out just to be invisible. They're told "talk to people" or "just be yourself".
But that's what they were bullied for. They never had a chance to learn how to "talk to people" or what "just be yourself" even means.
So then, every once in a while, they take a wild guess at how to interact with others. And they get bullied again.
Then they stop doing the wild guess that caused them to be bullied. And they're back to being invisible.
If they licked their boss's boots and tolerated a shitty wage, they'd still get replaced with machines as soon as it was possible. There's no point in pretending otherwise.